Archive notice: This article was originally published on September 3, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Exactly, because animations consist of software, hardware, creativity and coffee. And IFA shows which ways there are to make coffee or cool cola. Alongside white goods*, quite a lot has happened in consumer electronics, meaning end-user electronics – the 3D wave has arrived and practically all relevant manufacturers have presented devices.
Samsung
Samsung wants to whet our appetite for a 3D TV called the PN50C490. HDTV with 720p resolution, a contrast ratio of 2,000,000:1, USB ports and an HDMI connection areincluded. The price on Amazon USA is stated as 990 US dollars; no figure has yet been set for the price of the complete starter kit with glasses and other accessories.
Toshiba
Toshiba has turned the Satellite A665-3DV into a 3D laptop. A software update is now intended to enable stereoscopic viewing of 3D content, including 3D Blu-ray. It is also intended to address other 3D end devices and projectors via HMDI.
But there is no stand without a 3D TV, and at Toshiba the model is called "REGZA WL768" and is available with a maximum diameter of 55 inches – meaning 140 cm. A Full HD Edge LED backlight with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 and dynamic contrast of 7,000,000 to 1, with WLAN, HDMI, 3D Resolution+ and DVB-T2 tuner.
Of course, we could now also list the other models from LG, Sony and so on, but you have certainly recognised the direction. And naturally we cannot make any statement about image quality, colour fidelity and general playback quality – test devices are scarce, and assessing these parameters in colourfully illuminated trade-fair halls is difficult to impossible.
After these columns of figures, two more treats for the weekend:
The latest viral campaign from TippEx: interactive videos on YouTube. At http://www.youtube.com/user/tippexperience, a hunter is attacked by a bear – but refuses to shoot it. Instead, the user can enter what should happen to the animal – simply type “hug,” “Colours” or whatever else occurs to you on a Friday afternoon.
Patrick Woo’s demo reel of his work on Hellboy 2.
Guillermo del Toro, the creator of Hellboy 2, is incidentally said – unconfirmed and subject to change – to be working on a new project, “At the Mountains of Madness,” in collaboration with James Cameron and, of course, in 3D. “At the Mountains of Madness is an H. P. Lovecraft story, and del Toro’s morbid visual worlds should therefore be able to unfold wonderfully.
A summary of the plot from Wikipedia:
“The first-person narrator William Dyer describes the course of an expedition by members of Miskatonic University to Antarctica. At first, he and his team search for unusual and Mesozoic types of rock, such as Cretaceous shale. But then they come across a cave in which they discover fossils of a half-plant, half-animal race completely unknown to humanity. They find the prehistoric site of an apparently superior civilisation and realise that Earth’s prehistory was entirely different from what science had previously assumed.”
- We hereby also apologise for this useless Anglicism for the word “household appliances.”
